In this Feb. 22, 2017, file photo, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin listens at right as President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting on the Federal budget in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington.

WASHINGTON — During George W. Bush’s eight years in office, the federal debt roughly doubled. It doubled again under Barack Obama, a dubious fiscal record forever linking our two previous presidents, one a Republican, the other a Democrat. Now it’s Donald Trump’s turn, and one big question facing lawmakers is whether anyone can still do the math.

The bipartisan aspect of the Bush-Obama era deficit spending has a precedent. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan both campaigned for office on the twin promises of cutting government spending and balancing the federal budget. Far be it from me to accuse the two greatest 20th century U.S. presidents of being con men, but they didn’t really mean it.

There was a Great Depression to fight and the Cold War to win, great endeavors that required vast expenditures. So FDR and the Gipper, each acting in concert with a compliant Congress, spent more taxpayer money than their predecessors had. They also spent more, much more, than the U.S. Treasury was collecting, meaning that it wasn’t just current taxpayers footing the bills. These presidents borrowed from future generations.

Roosevelt raised taxes to pay for the New Deal, although the increases didn’t come close to covering the costs and really increased borrowing when the U.S. entered World War II. Reagan vowed to balance the budget, cut taxes and vastly increase defense spending. Two out of three ain’t bad, and he got some bang for the buck. The 1981 tax cuts did spur economic growth, and Reagan’s military buildup induced the Soviets to throw in the towel. So you give both men some credit. Yet every president has his crosses to bear, and the truth is that the last time the federal debt was reduced was when Calvin Coolidge was in the White House. But who has fond feelings for Calvin Coolidge? They’re not building monuments and naming airports after him. That kind of adulation goes to Roosevelt and Reagan, men who — while governing four decades apart — created a set of expectations that has produced a national debt now approaching $20 trillion.

This is the fiscal milieu inherited by President Trump. In recent days, conflicting portraits have taken shape about what he’s planning to do about it. The first was in the outlines of a tax reform proposal unveiled at the White House. The second was an off-the-cuff comment to Geraldo Rivera about Puerto Rican debt.

“They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street,” Trump said. “We’re going to have to wipe that out. I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs but whoever it is, you can wave goodbye to that.” The pronoun preceding “friends on Wall Street” was confusing. The president has more Wall Street pals than Geraldo and the White House is lousy with ex-Goldman Sachs officials.

Leaving that detail aside, it was nice to see Trump spontaneously exhibit empathy — even if his handlers, worried about tanking the bond market, promptly cleaned up after the elephant. The same week, the House and Senate passed budget resolutions on party-line votes. In the arcane rules of Washington, this is necessary so Congress can move to consideration of Republican tax plans that will not be subject to a Senate filibuster.

The administration plan would reduce the number of tax brackets from seven to three, with the top rate coming down from 39.6 percent to 35, the middle rate at 25 percent, and the lowest at 12 percent. It also doubles the standard deduction. Together, these steps would benefit most middle-class and working-class Americans. To make up for the loss of revenue, Trump’s plan eliminates the deduction for state and local taxes. It would create a new 25 percent tax rate for so-called “pass-through businesses,” lowering the rate for small business owners. It would also repeal the estate tax and alternative minimum tax and lower the corporate rate from 35 to 20 percent; these last three measures would disproportionately help the wealthy.

In a briefing with reporters, top White House economic adviser Gary D. Cohn deflected questions about how much Trump and his family stood to benefit from this plan by saying that ordinary Americans didn’t care about Trump’s taxes, they cared about their own. It’s an odd claim. When it comes to what “the American people” care about, it’s pretty clear that we don’t all care about the same thing. In my journalism experience, a politician pushing proposals that will profit him personally is a pretty well-read story. When questioned about taking away the state and local tax deduction, which will likely increase tax bills for middle-class Americans in high cost-of-living states, Cohn also made another dubious assertion: He said that only 25 percent of Americans itemize their taxes. This figure is misleading. When you get $75,000 or more in family income, about half of Americans itemize. That’s a lot of people.

Trump officials specifically, and Republicans generally, are impatient with such questions. To them, Democrats’ obsession with “fairness” in the tax code is merely a reflexive impulse to redistribute wealth. They have a point. It’s a creed that hasn’t changed much since Franklin Roosevelt’s day, and voters have grown tired of Democratic candidates’ constant mantra about Republicans who want to “reward millionaires and billionaires.”

Republicans are equally predictable. It’s one thing, as Cohn told reporters, to aver that the goal of the Trump plan is to spur business growth, employment and productivity. So far, so good. But when asked about an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget showing that the Trump plan would add $2.2 trillion to the deficit over 10 years, Cohn simply invoked a stale Republican catechism. “We think they’re wrong,” he replied. “We firmly believe that this tax plan will have a dramatic impact on economic growth. We know that 1 percent change in GDP will add $3 trillion back.”

If that sounds familiar to you — and too good to be true — there’s a reason. This is supply-side economics, the doctrine made famous by conservative theorist Arthur Laffer. Tax cuts pay for themselves via increased production, he said, a theory he condensed into a “curve,” which he wrote for Reagan on a napkin. It works, but only up to a point, which is why in 1986, Reagan and the Republicans had to accept a pretty huge tax increase, although they didn’t raise nearly enough to cover the checks written by a Republican president and a Democratic Congress.

In the closing days of his 1932 campaign, FDR vowed at a rally in Pittsburgh to balance the budget and slash “government operations” by 25 percent. While running for re-election four years later, Roosevelt prepared to take another trip to western Pennsylvania. Recalling his earlier promise, one discarded as soon as he reached the Oval Office, FDR asked speechwriter Sam Rosenman what he should say if asked about his broken promise. “Deny you were ever in Pittsburgh,” Rosenman quipped.

As they prepare to tackle major tax reform for the first time since 1986, Republicans and Democrats — and not just the “fiscal hawks” in Congress — might ask themselves this question: Four years from now, will they have to deny they were in Washington?

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